Trump’s Selective Devotion to Law and Order

Law enforcement officers were the backdrop for President Trump’s speech on Long Island in July.CreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

Republicans — like President Trump, for instance — love to puff up their chests, grasp their lapels and declaim in foghorn voices about their devotion to law and order.

And so, on Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, piously declared that the Justice Department should consider whether James Comey had broken the law before and after Trump fired him as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone’s broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the F.B.I., I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at,” she said. She was referring to Comey’s exoneration of Hillary Clinton in the email caper, and his admission that he had leaked his own private memo describing conversations with Trump.

It couldn’t get clearer than that, right? Not so fast.

On a Friday night in August, when Hurricane Harvey was barreling into Texas, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County, Ariz.a, sheriff who had blatantly violated a court order to stop detaining people because he thought they looked Mexican.

It didn’t bother President Law and Order that he undercut the courts’ only power to enforce their orders. His praise of Arpaio as being “very strong” on lawbreaking by border crossers did not mention that the former sheriff fed his victims rotten food in outdoor detention camps where temperatures soared and some prisoners even died. Or that he failed to investigate about 400 sex crimes.

Under the Trump formula, Comey should be investigated by the Justice Department — but Michael Flynn, who had to resign in disgrace as national security adviser, should get a pass for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his meetings with the Russian ambassador. On Wednesday, we learned that Democrats in Congress are asking questions about another memory slip by Flynn — failing to disclose a trip he took in 2015 to try to broker a Saudi-Russian deal on nuclear power plants — and that he may have lobbied inside the White House for that deal.

Because in Trump World, Flynn is a “good” guy, while Comey is not — and, that’s what this is all about. It’s a dark, twisted version of the “naughty and nice lists,” as reimagined by someone whose heart is at least two sizes too small.

Thus, Hillary Clinton should be “locked up” for her witless handling of her email server years ago, but Donald Trump Jr. should not be called to account for meeting last year with Kremlin agents to get “dirt” on Clinton, or later telling tall tales about the meeting.

The Trump Naughty list covers all undocumented immigrants (including those brought here as children) from Latin America and refugees of most kinds, especially Muslims.

Then there are the Americans who visited a website that organized protests against Trump after the election. The Justice Department wants their internet addresses — 1.3 million of them — and a District of Columbia judge in Washington actually approved the warrant with the ridiculous argument that he would review the information to protect “innocent” people. That would be all 1.3 million.

So their constitutional rights should be trampled in Trumpland. Yet we should respect those of the armed thugs who gathered in Charlottesville, Va., to defend symbols of racism in American history.

The law-and-order president wants to target journalists who cover his administration in ways he doesn’t like, subjecting them to leak investigations and, he has darkly hinted, perhaps a curtailment of their First Amendment rights.

The global Naughty List includes Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who should be there. But it excludes other bloodthirsty autocrats, like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, the Saudi royal family and Vladimir Putin.

Trump, of course, has his priorities straight. The Razak visit, he said, was about “very large trade deals” and Malaysia’s status as a “massive investor” in this country. Razak, no doubt by sheer coincidence, stayed at the Trump hotel in Washington.

Really, the Nice List is not so mysterious. To get on it, be a member of Trump’s family, support him with unquestioning and sycophantic loyalty, rule your country through blood and fear — or just throw money his way.

Correction:

An earlier version of this column referred incorrectly to the treatment of a Muslim group in Asia. Massacres of members of that group, the Rohingya, are being reported in Myanmar, not Malaysia.